Monthly Archives: January 2013

Some welcome winter colour from Christopher Corr in New York State where there’s both snow and sunshine. I’m guessing the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. It’s minus 14 but crucially the sun is shining. It makes all the difference. Chris … Read more…

A new exhibition at the British Museum brings together artefacts from museums across Europe, some as old as 42,000 years, and juxtaposes them with modern masters such as Henry Moore and Piet Mondrian. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice is displayed … Read more…

All this talk of winter trees and William Morris and I realise it’s time I went back to Epping Forest. It seems different every time I visit but today is something special, I’ve never seen it so thick with snow. … Read more…

The William Morris Gallery is at Water House in Lloyd Park, Forest Road, Walthamstow. William Morris was fourteen when his family moved here in 1848. They had downsized from Woodford Hall where William’s playground had been Epping Forest. At Water … Read more…

First there was this Christmas card from a painting by Mick Moon, made with oil paint & string on board and called simply Tree. Then I heard the three Staveley-Taylor sisters (aka The Staves) singing Winter Trees:

August 1954, aged 77, Pablo Casals performs Bach’s G-Major Suite for solo cello at Abbaye Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa near Prades in the French Pyrénées. In an ancient abbey in the south of France I once heard invisible plainsong. I realised eventually that … Read more…

When these children in Paraguay were given the opportunity to learn music there were more students than instruments. Cateura is Paraguay’s biggest landfill with a resourceful tradition of recycling. It seemed only appropriate to make musical instruments from waste materials. … Read more…

‘MERZsonata is a homage to Kurt Schwitters’ sound-text masterpiece, the Ursonate…Every sound…has a biographical connection to Schwitters (for example, he wrote a sneezing poem, and he used to bark like a dog each night during his time in the Hutchinson … Read more…